We welcome ourselves

Just to make things clear, this blog isn’t for you. It is 100 percent for us.

But if you feel like reading what we have written and perhaps even adding to the conversation, then you are most welcome to do so. Who knows, we might even respond.

The conversations in this blog will be about cinema, specifically the 250 movies that Sight & Sound Magazine have declared to be the greatest films of all time, as determined by the most authoritative poll of movie critics going. Although we might throw in a few wildcard entries along the way.

Recently, we decided to watch all 250 of these films, and now that we are a few movies into the exercise, we want to catalog our thoughts. We are not film students or aspiring filmmakers, so we have little use for crafting essays about what we have seen. Instead, we have done what most people do when it comes to interesting movies: we talk about them. That is the spirit we aim to capture with this blog. So, this is not a place for formal reviews but rather a record of what each of us is thinking and how those thoughts enrich or challenge each other. And dammit, we want to remember these thoughts and conversations; so like we said, this blog is for us.

For the purposes of this blog, we will simply be S. and J. As for any other personal details, we will say that S. is Australian and J. is an American — so expect some very divergent spelling — and that we both live in Melbourne, Australia. J. has seen way more movies than S., and so is probably more likely to pretend he knows what he’s talking about. But both of us have seen fewer than a third of the 250 films on the Sight & Sound list, and over 200 are new to at least one of us. We don’t plan to go about this systematically, but we are aiming to view the movies roughly in chronological order (1902 to 2011, a lot of time to cover). And some films just might not be possible to track down (We’re looking at you, Abel Gance’s Napoleon!). [UPDATE: Gotcha, Napoleon!!!]

The handful of films we have seen so far have really challenged and excited us, so we eagerly look forward to setting down our thoughts in electronic stone.